As data repositories are increasingly moved off-site, with central services designed around multiple data sets, customers are increasingly concerned about the security of their data. Data leaks are not unheard of, and both unintentional and malicious access of customer data can occur if environments are not properly sanitized and secured.
These issues are further exacerbated with the existence of value-added analytics by third parties. A variety of security and authorization tangles can result when, for example, a customer wishes to avail themselves of particular third-party tools to analyze their secure data. Drawing and accessing data to hand to the third party, or even worse providing the third party the user's own authorization credentials to a data repository, can greatly increase risk of data leakage or corruption and provide more opportunities for problems than the analytics themselves may be worth.
For this reason, service providers devote significant man-hours to tailor data environments to client needs. Not only are these custom environments expensive because of the labor costs associated with creating them, but there is no particular guarantee that a user error in a custom environment won't result in an exploitable vulnerability—an access error resulting in a data leak.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there may be significant problems and shortcomings associated with current techniques for customized access to data stored in offsite repositories.